When he’d finished, Kerrigan stepped to one side with Bryant so that they could have a brief conversation.

  Then, Kerrigan turned back to the group.

  “What if you’re wrong?” he said.

  “Then we’re all in an awful lot of trouble,” Winterson replied.

  “I don’t like it,” Kerrigan said. “This counter-offensive of yours. If The Spur were in tip-top operational shape then we might have a chance of pulling it off. But our repairs are still on-going,” he held up his hands to highlight the cramped confines of the battle bridge they were currently occupying. “We’d be doing well to be operating at seventy percent efficiency.”

  He didn’t suggest that the battle fleet should break off in order to re-group later but, clearly, he and Bryant had discussed it.

  “Unfortunately, this is not a simulation, Captain Kerrigan. You don’t get to clear the board and start over with this one. Whatever issues you might have with the ship’s efficiency, this is the reality of the situation: the ship is damaged, Hoyt is dead and you’re in command. And so far, every move you’ve made against Tyr has proven to be ineffective. We have to move to an offensive footing.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but that’s…”

  “I am your superior officer, captain, and you will hear me out. You have failed to take into account the limitations of this fleet and, as a result, everything you’ve done so far has played into the enemy’s hands. The one positive we can take from this is that the Hudson appears to have had a break-through, highlighting a small but crucial weakness in our enemy’s defences. And that’s a weakness we are honor bound to exploit.”

  *

  The tight parabola which the Renheim had been pursuing for so long had finally started to pay dividends, as they began to swing in towards Thor. Every fifteen minutes, Schwartz had been getting course updates from McNeill whose short-term scans were just about holding up. But nothing had changed. Thor had calculated her optimum track to the Henrietta Gate and clearly saw no reason to deviate from it.

  They were close enough to Thor now to get some decent images of their prey.

  From where they sat, on the port side and slightly to the rear, the bulk of the ship looked akin to some giant beetle’s carapace, its outer hull consisting of thick, green interlocking sub-sections, the main one being two kilometres high. What was even odder was that the front section was fortified with a solid triangular crown made up with two lower arms with a mighty central fin arcing overhead.

  “Looks like she’s been specially reinforced for a head on attack,” Schwartz said, daring to hope that this meant that she might be less well fortified elsewhere.

  “No doubt that’s got something to do with their main plan of attack. Nonetheless, I think this has gone on long enough.”

  Schwartz froze, fearing what he was about to say and yet knowing all too well what was coming.

  “But you haven’t had a chance to go over our new launch package yet, sir.”

  “No, but unless you’ve discovered a hidden cache of weapons down in the mess hall, I imagine that not much has changed,” he pushed himself out of the command chair and strode over to her. He touched her forearm.

  “When you’re ready, Katherine.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  She turned to address the bridge. “Lieutenant Whaites, initiate Plan Alpha.”

  Everyone immediately stopped what they were doing.

  “Initiating Plan Alpha, now.”

  One by one, the fourteen missiles in their first salvo streaked away from the ship. Each one targeted to strike Thor just ahead of what they took to be her port engine.

  Whaites had initially wanted to target the engine itself but Schwartz had argued that any designer who proposed to send a ship into space without protecting her main engine’s vent wouldn’t be working for long.

  A minute later, another fourteen missiles followed.

  Schwartz would have happily stood and watch them fly all the way to their target but, with an amber light flashing on her console, she was forced to go and deal with it.

  When she arrived at her console she had to look twice at the caller ID. It was Khan. Then she pressed ‘receive.’

  “We’ve just launched our first salvo,” she said, perfunctorily. “This better be good.”

  “Trust me, it is. Is the captain there?”

  “You want to speak to him?”

  “Not particularly. I just thought you ought to know: we’ve had to pull back the repair team on that forward engine. The shielding’s completely gone.”

  Schwartz worked her jaw up and down, unable to make sense of what she was being told.

  “How bad is it?”

  “I’m looking at the safety read-outs now and they’re off the scale but that’s not my biggest concern. My biggest concern is that the engine itself is starting to become unstable. We’re going to have to shut it down.”

  “Yeah. Only that’s not going to happen.”

  “I knew you’d say that. Except, sometimes, you don’t get a choice in these matters. And, as Chief Engineer, I’m just letting you know, we’re going to have to make a call on this sooner rather than later.”

  “Enemy are firing, sir.”

  “Stephen, I’ve got work to do.”

  “Okay. And Katherine?”

  “Yes?”

  “Look after yourself.”

  That caught her off-guard. Outside their quarters, he was always so particular about maintaining the necessary propriety for their various roles. She felt tears start to prick at her eyes.

  With her emotions buttoned down tight, she could handle all of this. What she just couldn’t handle was people being nice to her.

  “Tactical,” she snapped “What are we looking at?”

  “They opened big, ma’am. Thirty birds incoming.”

  “Have we got any decoys we can use?”

  “I’ve got two big boys locked and loaded.”

  He was referring, of course, to the SS-20s.

  “Then I suppose you’d better launch them.”

  It was an odd thing. While the bridge crew was tending to their defences, their eyes kept flitting over to the rudimentary read-out screen which showed how their missiles were faring. So far, they hadn’t lost a single one but there was plenty of time for that to change.

  Schwartz went over and told Faulkner what Khan had said.

  “He’s just going to have to get on with it then, isn’t he,” Faulkner said.

  “But what if he shuts her down. What then?”

  “He’s hardly likely to do that without checking with us first, is he?”

  She thought about this. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s your job to see that he doesn’t. We’re not going to be able to stay in this fight with only three engines, Katherine.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  She tried getting through to Khan in the engine room but the first person she spoke to said that he didn’t know where Khan was. She wasn’t happy with that response and insisted on speaking with whoever was in charge down there.

  While the man went off to find someone, she tried to make sense of what was happening with the missiles. Everything on the tactical read-outs had been scaled back due to the damage to their comms so she had to work out that they still had four missiles left to launch, while the countdown clock told her that the first ones were still two minutes from their target.

  It was an odd launch sequence but then, that was perhaps the point.

  After five minutes waiting for the guy down in engineering to get back to her, she closed the line and strode back towards Tactical.

  “Any joy with those shields?” she asked.

  Whaites turned on her. “You mean: did we damage them?”

  “That was our aim, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, judging from this, it would seem to have been a magnificent failure.”

  She looked at him blankly. “How come?”

  “We didn’t get anywhere near her shields,” he continued. “Her defensive missiles seem to have wiped us out.”

  Something deep in her gut twisted. “All of them?”

  “That’s what I said,” he retorted before remembering who he was talking to. “Sorry ma’am.”

  “We’re all tired,” she said flatly.

  “Still. That’s no excuse,” he said, though he looked chastened. “Should we continue with the second salvo, ma’am?”

  Schwartz blinked twice before looking over at Faulkner in the command chair.

  She couldn’t think what else to do. This whole plan rested on them being able to find some weakness in the enemy’s shields. And if they couldn’t even manage that, then what good were they?

  “No. Hold off from launching for the time being.”

  She’d already made one bad decision, there was no point compounding the issue by repeating it.

  *

  Proximity alerts were going off all over, but Schwartz tried to block them out, concentrating instead on the shoal of red dots surging towards them.

  “They’re coming in awful fast,” one of the ensigns observed.

  Schwartz had to agree but, at the back of her mind she was confident that their two SS-20s would do the job. Along with their Electronic Counter Measures, the two decoy missiles had big enough profiles to confuse most smart missiles into thinking that they posed their own offensive threat.

  They all stood and watched as the two sides came head-to-head. Normally, they’d have had a visual update but now they could only watch as the read out showed the two fronts continue on their way as though nothing had happened.

  “Well, that can’t be right,” someone said. “Got to be a glitch.”

  Then, almost as soon as they’d said it, the two SS-20s disappeared from the screen.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded on the comms section.

  A young officer turned and threw out his hands.

  “You’re seeing what we’re seeing. The incoming vectors haven’t been affected.”

  Which meant that all the incoming missiles had survived.

  “It’s up to our energy weapons now,” Whaites said.

  Schwartz felt like screaming. This couldn’t be happening. With only three laser batteries still remaining they weren’t going to be able to put up much of a fight.

  And so it proved.

  The four lead missiles detonated long before they reached the Renheim, their radioactive load sending lethal X-rays straight into the heart of the ship seconds before the hull caught the full force of their detonation.

  Renheim lurched to one side like a wounded animal, pitching Schwartz head-first into one of the consoles.

  For a moment, she lost consciousness and when she came around she could see that a large section of deck plating had been blown up from underneath. If she leaned forward, she found that she could look down into the deck below. She could see people down there, strewn about the room from the force of the explosion.

  A thick pall of smoke obscured the bridge’s front section of the bridge and she struggled to make sense of everything. People started appearing through the smoke, dazed by what they’d just experienced, and one of them was McNeill, the front of his jacket had been torn open but, other than that, he appeared to be unhurt.

  He looked right at her.

  “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No. I don’t think so. Have you seen that gash on your head?”

  Instinctively, she reached up to touch it, her fingers coming away slick with blood.

  “It’s nothing, I’ll be fine,” she sat up straight, coughing against the smoke. She looked over to her right. In the half-light everything looked off.

  “Where’s the captain?” she asked.

  His command chair wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

  McNeill grabbed her by the arm and helped her to her feet. For such a short man he proved surprisingly strong. He pointed towards the back of the room where the command chair was lying on its side, surrounded by a small group, one of whom appeared to be a medic.

  “Is that meant to happen?” McNeill frowned. “The chair, I mean.”

  “Explosive bolts,” she managed. “That’s right, I think.”

  Seeing that Schwartz was still unsteady on her feet, McNeill left her to go over and speak with the group. Then he came back.

  “Is he alright?”

  “He’s conscious. Chatting away. But they don’t want to move him ‘til they’ve given him the once over.”

  “I should go and see him,” but as soon as she started to move, her head began to throb and she was struck with a sudden wave of nausea.

  “Over here,” taking her hand in his, McNeill led her over to a small, recessed seating area.

  Schwartz sat down and was surprised how comfortable the seats were. It was odd, she reflected, that in all the years she’d served on the Renheim, she’d never had a reason to sit on these seats before.

  As soon as she was settled, she took the opportunity to look around. With the huge hole blown in the floor, the bridge area seemed barely recognisable. All the workstations on the left-hand side had either been destroyed or reduced to mere blackened stumps and the air was filled with the smell of burnt metal and melted polymers.

  She inclined her head in the direction of the ruptured deck plates.

  “What happened there?”

  “Seems they hit one of our magazines on C deck. Pure bad luck on our part. There’s fires breaking out all over and life support’s struggling to cope.”

  “My God,” she looked around, trying to take it all in. “How long was I out?”

  “Couple of minutes, no more.”

  It had felt like the work of only a few seconds.

  She had to get on top of this. Take control. Yet, at the same time, the idea of getting up and walking across the deck seemed like too much for her.

  “Where’s Whaites? We need to get that second salvo away.”

  McNeill was suddenly sombre.

  “Lieutenant Whaites is lying over there, in what’s left of the comms section,” when she leaned over to get a better look, he pulled a face. “I wouldn’t if I were you. It’s not very pretty.”

  She sank back against the wall.

  “Oh my God, this is awful!”

  “I know. Stay there and I’ll get someone to have a look at that head of yours.”

  *

  “What the hell is this?” Noah said.

  He dropped the jacket on the control deck in front of Elina and waited for her to react.

  Only she didn’t. She kept her attention fixed on the screens.

  “I’m busy.”

  “I don’t care how busy you are,” he was angry with her and very much wanted her to look at him, only she wouldn’t. “I need to know what this is doing here.”

  Elina finished entering the current data before glancing over. It was an old-fashioned baseball jacket. Green body, grey sleeves. Somebody had taken a lot of trouble to look after it but, in every other sense, it was completely unremarkable. She lifted one of the sleeves, sniffed at it before laying it down again.

  “Why are you wasting my time with this …” she sneered as she tried to think of the right word. “This shit .”

  Noah leaned across the control desk. “Because of this.”

  He pulled back part of the jacket to reveal the lining.

  She gave a noncommittal shrug. “What am I looking at?”

  “Here!” he pointed to the inside breast pocket. “Look!”

  She squinted at the hand-written name tag.

  “I don’t understand?”

  “It’s Tomaz’s jacket. See? That’s his name there.”

  She looked again and then nodded.

  “Okay. What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I don’t want you to do anything about it. I want you to tell me what it’s doing here.” Then he blurted out, “Is Tomaz on this ship?”

  Elina gave him a long hard look. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re not telling me the truth. Now, where is he?”

  She stood up, her hands on her hips.

  “You don’t get it, do you? He’s had this thing for, like, forever,” he smiled. “I mean, look at it. What’s it doing here?”

  Elina picked up the radio mic. “Bruin. I’m in the office. Get here, now.”

  Noah was confused. She was going to have him thrown out.

  He held the jacket up to her.

  “I need to know what’s this doing on your ship?”

  “Tomaz must have left it lying around.” But she sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than him. “One of the guys must have picked it up. You know what they’re like.”

  Noah was shaking his head.

  “No. No. He only ever wore this when he was off duty. Rest of the time, it was in his cabin. And he kept his cabin locked. The only way you’d even see this is if you’d been in there. Were you in his cabin, Elina? Is that where you went?”

  She started to deny it but then her face hardened. “I told him that it wasn’t too late for us. That we could still make it work. We were good for one another.”

  “I see,” Noah’s head dropped at that. “And he turned you down. Is that it?”

  Elina’s eyes fixed on him. “No.”

  She went over to her desk and took out a small black box.

  She gave it to Noah who opened it.

  “A ring?”

  “He’d been carrying it around with him for over a year. Biding his time, he said. Only, one night, he got into a conversation with some guys in a bar. They told him this horrible story about a ship load of refugees trying to escape from some slaver ship. Eventually, their air ran out. Can you imagine that? Being so frightened of something you’d rather suffocate than face them?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That this was the slaver ship they were running from. Peter the Great. It was us. That’s when Tomaz realised,” she smiled a thin, bitter smile. “Realised who I really was.”

  The door behind Noah flew open and he was quickly overpowered with men flooding into the cabin.

  Yet he still managed to keep hold of the box.

  “But, if that’s true, why give you the ring?”

  She came around to confront him.